{"id":1135,"date":"2015-06-15T16:36:23","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T15:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2015-06-15T16:43:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T15:43:29","slug":"road-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2015\/06\/road-movie.html","title":{"rendered":"Road movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"London<\/a><\/p>\n

London Road<\/em> should never have worked on stage. It really<\/em> shouldn\u2019t work on screen.\u00a0It’s a\u00a0musical about a horrible news story \u2013 a series of murders of prostitutes in eastern England committed by Steve Wright, who was convicted in 2006. The writer Alecky Blythe, who has developed a morally telling form of verbatim theatre that preserves her interviewees\u2019 vocal quirks and stumbles, paired up with composer Adam Cork. Their unlikely musical was directed at the National Theatre <\/a>by Rufus Norris in 2011 \u2013 and now it\u2019s a film<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both pieces are less about the murders than a community in crisis. The residents of London Road, where Wright lived, share in the fear of a killer is at large (\u2018everybody\u2019s very very nervous\u2019 begins one song), then pick through a cat\u2019s cradle of blue and white police tape and a slavering press pack. They cower indoors, watching their own street on the television news. The only upside to the police presence, one homeowner says, is that \u2018nobody stole our festive wreath this year.\u2019 Gradually, the bewildered neighbours forge a communal positivity.<\/p>\n

Sliding into song<\/strong><\/p>\n

London Road<\/em> was startling on stage \u2013 verbatim<\/a>, steeped in authenticity, meeting the unabashed fabrication of musical theatre. On film<\/a>, the disconnect is, if anything, even sharper. Norris gives the first half the grey pallor of despondent documentary, making the songs even more incongruous.<\/p>\n

Characters here\u00a0slide rather than burst into song.\u00a0Cork’s \u2018numbers\u2019 are quite unlike classic movie songs, in which people sing to share their joy, or amplify their interior life, or because their feelings reach an intensity that mere speech cannot compass. In London Road<\/em>, emotions are almost subcutaneous, niggling beneath the skin. Remarkably, the hesitations and tics preserved in the dialogue also shape the songs. Platitudes conceal profound anxieties, and a rare complexity of emotion emerges \u2013 as when two schoolgirls cross town, gleefully scared, singing \u2018I could, like, cry,\u2019 and immediately giggle. Seeing the original stage production, I felt <\/a>that it \u2018returns the complex texture of human life to music theatre.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Kate<\/a>

Kate Fleetwood in London Road on stage. Photo: Tristram Kenton\/Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

Blythe holds onto her process \u2013 extracts from her recorded interviews play over the final credits. Looking at my notebook two weeks after the screening, it\u2019s not entirely clear which of the lines I copied were spoken or sung. That\u2019s only fitting. Many of the cast (like Claire Moore and Rosalie Craig) have musical-theatre cred, but there\u2019s a demi-tuneless quality to the voices. They\u2019re often barely supported by an orchestra \u2013 more tellingly, voices aggregate into a chorale of fear and agitation. Most affecting is Clare Burt\u2019s crackle-voiced resident, who eventually moves away from her neighbours. \u2018They must have sleepless nights,\u2019 she sings quietly. \u2018I know I do.\u2019<\/p>\n

Blythe and Norris tweak the structure, making the chronology more strongly linear. The show (like Little Revolution<\/em><\/a>, Blythe\u2019s recent play set in the aftermath of the London riots), began with a local meeting about the \u2018London Road in Bloom\u2019 event. This happens late in the film, which opens with a series of interviews during the police manhunt. The grainy visual texture suggests a documentary (we never see a Blythe figure, only Michael Shaeffer\u2019s smooth-coiffed tv reporter). The stage Julie seemed a community powerhouse from the beginning; here, her community role creeps up on her, as it does on her daughter (a sullen teen who becomes the eager-beaver photographer at the street party).<\/p>\n

Homebody into hooker<\/strong><\/p>\n

The National\u2019s 11-strong ensemble played multiple roles: morphing from neighbours to shoppers, from police to press to, briefly, prostitutes. On film, it\u2019s one role apiece, adding bigger names to the stalwarts of subsidised theatre. Olivia Coleman (pictured top) takes the pivotal role, Julie, organiser of the garden competition, and Anita Dobson is among her neighbours. Most startling is Tom \u2018Mad Max\u2019 Hardy, stumble-crooning through a cab driver\u2019s disconcerting stab at psychological profiling.<\/p>\n

Several original cast members relinquish the roles they created \u2013 notably, Kate Fleetwood, the first Julie, now playing a prostitute named Vicky. The working women, barely seen on stage, are present from the beginning, almost as a rebuke to the community that would rather they vanished. Norris\u2019 travelling camera catches them staring back blankly at roadsides. Three prostitutes listen in the rain to cheers from the church hall as the verdict is announced. Fleetwood\u2019s slide from homebody to hooker suggests that community is more permeable, less comfortable than you might imagine.<\/p>\n

Nailing down meaning<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stage-to-screen transfers commonly regard their material with exaggerated respect \u2013 as if reluctant to reimagine it in cinematic terms. A previous National Theatre adaptation, Nicholas Hytner\u2019s film of The History Boys<\/em><\/a>, works best as a record of three-ply performances. Norris, however, has Danny Cohen’s camera enhance the unease around this material as it closes in on characters and then dislocatingly draws back. At the beginning, tv broadcasts introduce crime hunt while the camera glides from house to house, residents transfixed by the screen. Later, over reports from the trial, camera wanders through the boarded-up crime scene. Norris doesn\u2019t sensationalise, or linger on gore, but leaves space for our queasy reflection.<\/p>\n

A theatre is a toybox, but a camera gives control. Norris and his team (again including designer Katrina Lindsay<\/a> and choreographer Javier De Frutos<\/a>) can nail down meaning on film. The colour scheme, uncompromisingly schematic, imposes a grey-lit beginning before busting out the florals. Initially, every scene is dunked in the colour of grim: even the Christmas decorations are all in the same glum evergreens. Warm tones enter with the first meeting of the residents, accented with red chairs and coats. (Norris isn\u2019t sentimental, however: at the end everyone leaves Nick Holder\u2019s organiser to stack all the chairs he painstakingly laid out.)<\/p>\n

Winter turns to summer as residents pull together for a celebratory \u2018London Road in Bloom\u2019 competition: pink-glowing lamps appear at home, and as the jury\u2019s verdict offers a degree of official closure, we cut to a close up of the profusion of blooms in Julie\u2019s hanging baskets. Colman leads a lilting, touchingly hesitant catalogue of posies: \u2018Begonias, and \u2013 petunias, and \u2013 um \u2013 impatiens and things.\u2019 It\u2019s as close as the score gets to a breakout number \u2013 I\u2019ve been humming it ever since I saw the stage show.<\/p>\n

What makes a community?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some viewers have expressed unease at the way Wright\u2019s victims are marginalised. Blythe avoids representing the dead women and their murderer, because her interest is in what makes a community. A unique external pressure both inspires an unlikely resilience \u2013 but also exposes how a community defines itself, closing its face to outsiders. London Road<\/em> is an acutely political piece for an age in which cultural borders are policed with rigour. Olivia Colman<\/a> \u2013 typically cast for everywoman relatability \u2013 disconcertingly confides Julie\u2019s lack of sympathy for the dead women. \u2018They\u2019re better off seven feet under,\u2019 she says. \u2018I\u2019d love to shake his [Wright\u2019s] hand \u2013 say thanks very much for getting rid of them.\u2019 It\u2019s a quietly shocking moment, one that no amount of petunias can soften. The film\u2019s visual language seems more celebratory than I remember from the stage, but a wash of troubled ambiguity remains. In the final scene, bunting crisscrosses the street, replacing the police tape, and Fleetwood\u2019s working girl passes through the throng, witness to her own erasure.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

London Road should never have worked on stage. It really shouldn\u2019t work on screen.\u00a0It’s a\u00a0musical about a horrible news story \u2013 a series of murders of prostitutes in eastern England committed by Steve Wright, who was convicted in 2006. The writer Alecky Blythe, who has developed a morally telling form of verbatim theatre that preserves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,102],"class_list":{"0":"post-1135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-theatre","9":"tag-verbatim","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1141,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}